NASCOURT is BACK.
After the lawsuit against NASCAR by 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports settled back in December, it seemed like we were going to have a season free of legal drama…but now a team has filed a lawsuit against a former crew chief and competition director.
The lawsuit was filed today by Joe Gibbs Racing against Chris Gabehart, who was crew chief for Denny Hamlin from 2019 to 2024 and most recently served as Director of Competition for the team until leaving after the 2025 season.
In their complaint filed in federal court in the Western District of North Carolina, JGR accuses Gabehart of a “brazen scheme to steal JGR’s most sensitive information and use it for the benefit of a direct competitor,” revealed to be Spire Motorsports.
Gabehart first began working for the Cup Series team as an engineer in 2012, before eventually working his way up to crew chief for Hamlin and eventually, competition director. And as part of his contract with the team, Gabehart signed a non-compete agreement that would prohibit him from working for another Cup Series team for a period of 9 months after the termination of his contract.
According to the lawsuit, Gabehart became unhappy with his position at JGR during the 2025 Cup Series season and asked the team for “complete responsibility and control” of all departments supporting their competition efforts, eventually requesting a meeting with Joe Gibbs himself to request what the team calls “carte blanche authority over all racing decisions.”
Gibbs refused to give more authority to Gabehart, who decided at that point to leave the company. The team says that they were prepared to offer Gabehart “a generous separation agreement” that would have permitted him to work for another team so long as he didn’t solicit JGR employees and agreed to return all confidential information.
The team says they learned that Gabehart had been meeting with Jeff Dickerson, owner of Spire Motorsports, and became suspicious of Gabehart. As a result, the team began to conduct a forensic audit of Gabehart’s team-issued laptop:
“The results were shocking.”
JGR says that Gabehart had synced his team laptop to his personal Google Drive, and created a folder in called “Spire” that contained a subfolder named “Past Setups.” He also reportedly had “more than a dozen photos” containing JGR confidential information and trade secrets, as well as 20 race car setup files.
Among the files, the team says that Gabehart took photos on his cell phone of team payroll information, post-race audit and performance analysis of each JGR driver for the entire 2025 season, revenues from sponsorship, pit crew analytics, and more. They allege that he took photos of the documents in order to attempt to hide that he was moving files, and that the Spire photo on his drive contained files from his time at JGR.
The team says that after they discovered Gabehart had kept their confidential information, they agreed to a forensic review under the condition that Gabehart wouldn’t immediately go to another Cup Series team. Obviously Gabehart (who reportedly had already received an offer from Spire) declined, resulting in the lawsuit being filed by the team.
In their complaint, Joe Gibbs Racing says that they learned on February 11, 2026 that Gabehart planned to accept the position of Chief Motorsports Officer at Spire, which currently fields the #7 car of Daniel Suarez, the #71 of Michael McDowell and the #77 of Carson Hocevar. But they allege that Gabehart had already planned to provide JGR’s confidential information to Spire Motorsports when he met with Dickerson back in December.
The lawsuit asks for damages “in excess of” $8 million for misappropriation of trade secrets and unfair trade practices, as well as an injunction forcing Gabehart to return any confidential information to JGR and cease from providing any of their trade secrets to other teams.
So far neither Gabehart nor Spire have commented on the lawsuit, and Spire has not officially announced Gabehart’s hiring (although I guess now we know why).
Gabehart is highly regarded for his engineering knowledge and is widely credited with the success Denny Hamlin had during the years Gabehart served as his crew chief. There’s no doubt that pretty much any team in the garage area would have been willing to hire him after he left Joe Gibbs Racing, but now it will be interesting to see whether JGR tries to enforce the non-compete agreement in his contract to keep him from immediately joining Spire.
And we thought NASCAR would be free from legal drama this season…
